For many years, there has been a growing demand for electronic systems that provide visual and/or audible content to consumers. Previously, content providers have supplied consumers with content in a variety of forms (e.g., vinyl records, audio cassette tapes, video cassette recorder “VCR” tapes, etc.). When played back in an analog format, the content is somewhat protected at that time. For example, analog content is troublesome to illicitly copy and redistribute. Also, the recorded copies have poorer image or sound quality than the original content.
Over the last few years, there has been a growing demand for and use of digital content. For instance, digital versatile disks (DVDs) are an optical disc technology that is expected to rapidly replace the CD-ROM discs over the next few years. A DVD digitally stores content (e.g., Motion Picture Experts Group-2 “MPEG-2” file), and during use, the content is retrieved, processed and converted into an analog format just prior to playback.
One concern experienced by content providers is that computers are now being manufactured with DVD-RAM drives that enables data to be written on a DVD. As a result, content may be retrieved from a DVD, temporarily stored in its digital format, and subsequently rewritten on a new DVD. Thus, copies with the same images and/or sound quality as the master may be illegally reproduced and sold.
In order to protect content providers from unauthorized copying and distribution of their digital content, a data scrambling scheme is performed during playback decoding of the DVD in order to avoid extraction of unmodified digital content. In particular, the bit streams retrieved from sectors of the DVD are scrambled by the DVD playback application and the scrambled bit streams are transferred to a driver software. The driver software performs descrambling operations on the scrambled bit streams. This enables recovery of the original bit streams before transmission to the graphics hardware to decode and display the images.
The data scrambling scheme involves the application of a sign mask to each block of the bit stream. More specifically, bits of the sign mask are Exclusively OR'ed (XOR'ed) with signed bits of DCT coefficients partially forming the block. Thereafter, the sign mask is transferred from the DVD playback application to the driver software for later use to descramble and recover the original bit stream.
One disadvantage with this content protection mechanism is that the data scrambling scheme can be circumvented if a third party obtains the particulars of the sign mask, which is transferred in the clear between the DVD playback application and the software driver. This threat may impede further expansion of digital content distribution.